Black and white flash sheet of three stylised bat head designs stacked vertically, with engraved wings and stippled shading.

Three stacked bat head designs in black ink

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

Three bat or creature head designs are stacked vertically on a plain white background. Each head has bold solid black areas, fine engraved hatching on the wings and dense dotted stippling on the faces and ruffs. The sheet is entirely black and white with generous white space around each design.

Blackwork Dotwork Bat Creature Wing Fangs Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bats came to Harrow Point the winter the lifts stopped, and nobody on the fourteenth floor thought much of it until Mrs Adeyemi found one asleep in her shoe rack, folded up like a dropped glove with its ears wrapped round its face. There were three of them, the old men in the flats below said, one for each stairwell, and they hung from the concrete overhang at the top of the block where the wind came up off the car park. They were not kind creatures. They took the pigeons' ledges and the wiring, and at dusk they dropped past the windows with a sound like someone tearing wet paper.

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The council man came with his ladders and a roll of netting. He wanted them gone by Friday. Mrs Adeyemi went up the stairs with a tin of sardines and a bad knee and sat on the landing beneath the overhang, and she talked to them about her husband's pension and her son in Leeds who never rang. She told them the rent was late and the boiler was worse. The bats watched her with their round, shining eyes and their ruffs of spiked fur, and they listened the way a congregation listens to a sermon it has heard many times before.

On Friday the netting was rolled up and left in the bin store. The lifts still did not work. But every evening after that, three dark shapes went over the car park at the hour the kettles boiled, and the children on the ninth floor counted them from the balconies. If you asked the caretaker why the block had gone so quiet, he would tell you the bats had taken the complaints away with them, and that nobody had asked what they were paid in.